Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea

Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea, first published as Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea, is a book by Mark Kurlansky. It follows the history of nonviolence and nonviolent activism, focusing on religious and political ideals from early history to the present.

The Τwenty-Five Lessons
Kurlansky summarizes the Twenty-Five Lessons as follows:
 * 1) There is no proactive word for nonviolence [in English].
 * 2) Nations that build military forces as deterrents will eventually use them.
 * 3) Practitioners of nonviolence are seen as enemies of the state.
 * 4) Once a state takes over a religion, the religion loses its nonviolent teachings.
 * 5) A rebel can be defanged and co-opted by making him a saint after he is dead.
 * 6) Somewhere behind every war there are always a few founding lies.
 * 7) A propaganda machine promoting hatred always has a war waiting in the wings.
 * 8) People who go to war start to resemble their enemy.
 * 9) A conflict between a violent and a nonviolent force is a moral argument. If the violent side can provoke the nonviolent side into violence, the violent side has won.
 * 10) The problem lies not in the nature of man, but in the nature of power.
 * 11) The longer a war lasts, the less popular it becomes.
 * 12) The state imagines it is impotent without a military because it can not conceive of power without force.
 * 13) It is often not the largest, but the best organized and most articulate group that prevails.
 * 14) All debate momentarily ends with an enforced silence once the first shots are fired.
 * 15) A shooting war is not necessary to overthrow an established power, but is used to consolidate the revolution itself.
 * 16) Violence does not resolve; it always leads to more violence.
 * 17) Warfare produces peace activists. A group of veterans is a likely place to find peace activists.
 * 18) People motivated by fear do not act well.
 * 19) While it is perfectly feasible to convince a people faced with brutal oppression to rise up in a suicidal attack on their oppressor, it is almost impossible to convince them to meet deadly violence with nonviolent resistance.
 * 20) Wars do not have to be sold to the general public if they can be carried out by an all-volunteer professional military.
 * 21) Once you start the business of killing, you just get deeper and deeper without limits.
 * 22) Violence always comes with a supposedly rational explanation, which is only dismissed as irrational if the violence fails.
 * 23) Violence is a virus that infects and takes over.
 * 24) The miracle is that despite all of society's promotion of warfare, most soldiers find warfare to be a wrenching departure from their own moral values.
 * 25) The hard work of beginning a movement to end war has already been done.

Awards
This book was the 2007 non-fiction winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.